New York hedge-fund manager Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher is looking more and more like Bernie Madoff.
Fletcher’s master hedge fund, Fletcher International, which filed for bankruptcy protection in June 2012, was a fraud with “many of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme,” according to a bombshell report.
After a year-long investigation, trustee Richard J. Davis concluded this week in a nearly 300-page report that there were virtually no assets left to pay Fletcher’s creditors.
By the date of its bankruptcy, Fletcher “held only one asset of undisputed value — Helix stock — worth less than $8 million,” Davis said in the report filed in federal bankruptcy court. Fletcher had valued the fund at $352 million.
The alleged fraud was defined by “the extensive use of wildly inflated valuations, the existence of fictitious assets under management numbers, the improper payment of excessive fees” and “misuse of investor money.”
The Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are also investigating Fletcher’s hedge fund, and earlier this year subpoenaed documents from the trustee.
Davis said the “ultimate victims of this fraud” were four public employee pension funds that invested a combined $125 million since mid-2007.
Some $8 million of the pension fund money was siphoned off to finance a movie being made by Fletcher’s brother Geoffrey. Another $1 million went to pay for legal expenses from Fletcher’s ongoing racial discrimination suit against Manhattan’s famed Dakota apartment building.
The alleged fraud was, the report says, aided by hedge-fund administrator Citco, which lent the Fletcher fund money to buy a fund Citco wanted to dump, then introduced one of the pension funds to Fletcher; that money helped pay Citco back.
Fletcher, 48, could not be reached for comment.